We all know that data can sometimes be unreliable, but columnist Andrew Shotland makes the case for why we shouldn't just rely on free Google tools for data collection and analysis.

While proving the value of your work has always been a thing, it seems that lately, more and more businesses are looking for ways to justify their local SEO spend. One of the challenges is that most of the time, particularly with multi-location brands, making sense of the internal and external data can be nearly impossible.

My thinking about this topic started off with one of our clients expressing recently that while we appeared to be hitting our organic traffic goals, their boss wasn’t seeing it. Most of their conversions happened over the phone, but thanks to [insert favorite corporate complexities here], they couldn’t tie organic traffic back to phone leads.

And so, our client’s boss was looking at Google Analytics and Google Search Console data and not really getting the whole story, even when we took pains to tell it in a very simple way. Just showing rank tracking reports wasn’t really achieving our goal of getting the client’s eyes to not glaze over.